Happy Acres is a forty acre farm in a rural area of south central Michigan. It has been farmed non-chemically, and largely organically, for over 20 years by a married couple, both of whom have retired from full-time, off-farm employment. Most of the acreage lies fallow, but the ten to twelve acres closest to the house is highly diversified in its production. In addition to an extensive family garden, there are large berry patches, a mixed fruit orchard, two small ponds stocked with several varieties of fish, extensive flower gardens, rabbit hutches, and assorted pens, brooder boxes and incubation chambers for raising wild and domestic birds. The area of the farm is a jumble of natural projects and experiments. There is no overall or ordered farm plan. Instead, an unwieldy spontaneity emerges from the interconnection and interaction of its many parts.
The farm provides a small supplemental income for its owner-operators, mainly through weekly egg sales. It also provides one third to one half of the family's subsistence. Despite a desire to increase production sales, the couple values the farm less for its commercial potential and more for the life style it provides. The farm provides a way to keep busy -- a daily routine as well as a source of pure enjoyment -- a vital place from which to observe nature and natural processes. Value is also placed on the recycling of materials and nutrients. Using farm and household resources in multiple and creative ways reflects a belief in the importance of personal self-reliance and enterprise sustainability. chickens and geese have been used sporadically to weed berry patches and orchards.
The farm's idiosyncratic nature makes its management especially labor intensive. The
couple would like to hire someone full-time to help them with their farm and yard work.
Their health has begun to fail and they would like time to travel. They have had little
success finding anyone willing to work hard enough or able to anticipate "what needs
to be done next." Consistent with their sense of reciprocity and integration, they
are looking for an apprentice or farm hand with whom they can establish a
mutually-supportive, kinship-like relationship.
The farm operators clearly stated that they considered part of
sustainability to be the ability for a farm operation to economically support itself.
Although this is a goal for this farm, it has not been attained yet. One of the farm
operators stated, "In terms of money, no, we're not very successful, but the farm is
successful in that it keeps us busy."
The farm operators did not based their concept of sustainability on a large foundation of academic work. Their descriptions of sustainable agriculture and organic agriculture were one and the same, which is clearly different from the academic literature on these topics. This discrepancy was not an issue for them, since they were content with their definitions of organic and sustainable agriculture.